How do I stop network flooding using Windows 2003 Network Load balancing?

Question

I know that the MsNLB can be configured to user mulitcast with IGMP. However, if the switch does not support IGMP what are the options?

Answer 1

If you can find an old "dumb" hub, you can run the node NIC's through it, or if your switch is managable you can set the ports up so that they do not remember the MAC address to IP address mappings.

I will say that I have had horrible experience with WLBS (the 2003+ version of NLB) in regards to port flooding. We have an existing load balanced system where we have the load balanced NIC's going into a VLAN to keep the traffic separate and we've turned off the MAC address to IP mapping in order to reduce the problem. We are migrating the load balancing off of WLBS; however, due to the reliability of this configuration.